The Science, Myth, and Music of Rebirth

Lots of little things have been happening here. P, who has been trying for weeks or months to learn to snap her fingers, came to me a few days ago and announced that she'd done it! Sure enough, she can snap left-handed, but not right-handed yet. I remember a similar process when I was learning. P has also started reading before bed, on nights when she's not too tired. She's working her way through Charlotte's Web. Today she picked up a booklet she'd been creating at school on the seasons, and she added some text and pictures to it about winter.

Recently P came to me, asking if I knew where the little cheat-strip for her toy piano was -- the strip that identifies the notes, so she can play specially coded music without actually being able to read musical notation. I had no idea what had happened to it, so I offered to teach her the basics of reading music. She said no, thanks. I just sat down and started drawing a basic key to treble-clef piano music: A keyboard diagram labeled with note names, a scale labeled with note names, and the full tune and words for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," because I know she can play it by ear. I didn't ask her to look at it or do anything with it, but P was sucked in and watched the process of scoring the song with interest, and now it's in her room by the piano. I've been doing that a fair amount lately. I'll offer to show her something, and if she says no but I really believe she would like whatever it is, I'll just start doing it independently. She almost always ends up interested. A part of this can feel wrong -- as if I'm ignoring what she says. But so far it's working out well. She doesn't complain about any of this as long as I'm not coercing her participation, and often something fun comes out of my little diversions. It's one of my current ways of strewing the kids' paths with interesting stuff. I've considered not asking, just starting the thing on my own -- but for some things the questions help draw attention to something P might never otherwise notice was happening.

Yesterday a lot of little things came together into a big thing -- the day took on a spring theme. We were planning to go to a homeschoolers' park day, but the weather was chilly and damp, so we decided to stay in. T and P were both excited about dyeing eggs, so we did that. I dyed one by wrapping it in yellow onion skins and then in aluminum foil before boiling it, and P asked why that made it turn colors, which led to other good questions like, "If someone were dying cloth orange, would they wrap the cloth up with onion skins and foil?" I've been learning about natural dyes for fiber from guild presentations and magazines recently, so although I haven't tried it yet, I was able to answer her questions.

After the eggs were all dyed and put away, I gave the kids some lunch. As they were winding up eating, I pulled up some animations on YouTube about why the Earth has seasons. The ones I found were either aimed at adults (but with lots of good information), or aimed at kids and almost totally lacking in understandable content, but fortunately this is a topic I know well, so we stopped the video a lot so I could explain things in a more helpful way. P asked why the Tropic of Cancer was named that, and since I had no idea, we looked it up. It turns out that the precession of the equinoxes has made the name inaccurate, since it was originally named for the constellation in which the Sun was located at the June solstice, when the Sun is directly overhead at that Tropic (were it named using the same rule today, it would be called the Tropic of Taurus or the Tropic of Gemini, depending on whether you like to listen to astronomers or astrologers about where the Sun is), but P's giggle at the idea of the Earth wobbling like a top in extremely slow motion was priceless. Later last night, as I was writing this, I learned more about what causes axial precession: gravity from the Sun and Moon pulling on Earth's equatorial bulge. I also learned that the orbits themselves precess, so that the longer-term diagram of planetary orbits might look more like a flower-petal design than an ellipse.

Having discussed the science behind spring, I offered to tell P the Greek myth about why we have seasons -- the story of Persephone. "No, thanks." "Okay." I sat down and found a web site where the story was told in brief, kid-friendly language, and which also linked to a 4-minute video depicting a modernized version of the myth. T, and then P, got sucked into that video. I read P the story, since the video told it differently. P asked for another Greek myth, and I thought Orpheus and Eurydice might be a good segue, also being about an attempt to get a soul back from the Underworld. The web site with the Persephone story didn't offer Orpheus, so we went looking and stumbled across YouTube clips of the series, Jim Henson: The Storyteller. These Greek-myth episodes are dark and somewhat stylized -- not what I would have expected to draw P in -- but we were all three mesmerized. The storytelling is much more Grimm than Disney, and I've been thinking that was a direction we should be exploring. P was eager for more, so we also watched the Storyteller version of Icarus and Daedalus. We're looking forward to checking the full series out from the library and seeing more. Over dinner, I told UnschoolerDad that we'd been checking out some Greek mythology today, and P asked why it was called mythology. That led to a brief discussion that tied up today's explorations with each other nicely -- the idea that myths are what the people of a culture use to explain what they see in the world, which is what science has been increasingly able to do with the passage of time.

Out of the blue, P found Pike's Peak (which we recently visited) on the world map hanging in our hallway, a freebie from Doctors Without Borders that happens to use the Mercator projection. I showed her Greece and Crete on the map, since those were the settings of the myth-based videos we'd watched earlier. P remarked that Greenland was the biggest island she had ever heard of. She has a globe, so I pointed out Greenland there and P learned a little about how flat maps, especially Mercator projections, tend to exaggerate the size of high-latitude features.

Finally, P and T were playing with some bird calls yesterday afternoon. T was playing a duck call, and P was trying to describe what he sounded like in terms of animals -- duck, cow, etc. I said I thought he sounded like a crumhorn. P wanted to know about crumhorns, so we found a photo of some and a video of two musicians playing a duet on crumhorns.

P loved the musical style, so we went looking for more Renaissance music to listen to. P noticed that the church in which one of the videos was set had no pews, so we talked a bit about the Catholic and Eastern churches and their histories. (As it turns out, the church in the video is a Protestant church with removable seating!) We mostly found motets rather than madrigals, so the content wasn't specifically Spring-y, but the idea of Renaissance as rebirth tied the day together nicely.